


Process Group

by gonfalonier



Category: The Walking Dead & Related Fandoms, The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma, complicated adult emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-26 23:30:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12069171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gonfalonier/pseuds/gonfalonier
Summary: Carl doesn't understand what nearly happened to him when he was put on his knees by The Claimers, but he knows it was bad.  He knows it was so, so bad.





	Process Group

**Author's Note:**

> this was a therapeutic exercise for me, a rape survivor. thanks.

He’s tried to talk about it before. Not with his dad, he’ll never talk about it with him. Michonne was there and she’s never brought it up again. Daryl, too. Maybe Carl isn’t supposed to talk about it. He feels like a lost dog moping from creature to creature: _Are you my mommy?_

He tried with Sasha. “It’s pretty fucked up out there,” he said, and she told him his daddy’d better never hear him talk like that. She was smiling. He didn’t want her to stop smiling, so instead he listed all the swears he knew, even if he didn’t know what they meant. They ended up laughing and inventing new cusses. It was cool.

There was one time he was alone with Carol, and that didn’t happen often, so he took a chance. She seemed wise. They were cleaning pistols. “How do you deal with it,” he said, “when men look at you and you don’t want them to?” She didn’t say anything for a long time, but he could see her smiling. She clicked the slide back into place and said, “That doesn’t happen to me anymore.” She placed the weapon aside. “Is there a man looking at you, Carl?”

“No,” he said. “Forget it.”

“You know how to fight,” she said kindly. “You know how to shoot. The next time he does anything, even just a look? Blow his fucking head off.”

It had made Carl laugh at the time, and then later in the night the chill came on. In bed, in his clothes, with an arm slung over his head, he’d meditated on Carol’s words and replied bitterly to no one, “Well gee fucking whiz, why didn’t I think of that.” In the morning, he took an iron supplement and tamped down his need. Nobody else gets closure about shit.

*

He’s sitting cross-legged on the chair in Negan’s small bedroom. He’s reading a book, a paperback about a serial killer. He’s locked in. The windows are too high to climb out unless he scales the bookcase, and he knows what’s out there so he’s fine where he is. And he likes the book, it’s engrossing, written in a time when gore was different, written by a man who had no idea. The action in the book moves slowly, everyone making phone calls, coordinating task forces, lining up strategies and not doing anything at all. Imagine.

The door clicks and Carl turns to look. Negan’s in his leathers, unshaven, a scratch on his cheek and blood on his bat. He grins wide and kicks the door closed with the heel of his boot. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” he says. “Let down that hair.” Carl scoffs and returns to his book. He hears Negan approaching, smells him, and he goes still when the back of the chair sags as Negan leans against it on his folded arms. There’s a rhythmic scratch, Lucille catching on the fabric where she’s dangling between Negan’s fingers. When Negan speaks, his breath puffs over Carl’s hair and tickles it against his neck. “What have you got?”

Carl moves away, closes his book without marking the page. He stands even though he’s shaky on his legs, pins and needles from sitting too long. “It’s just a book,” he says. “Nothing else to do in here.”

Negan laughs. “You know that’s not true.” He takes Carl’s place on the chair and stretches his legs out with a satisfied sigh. “I remember being your age. Plenty to do, as I recall.”

Carl curls his lip and says, “That’s gross.”

“Only cause you made it that way,” Negan shoots back, still smiling. Friendly. Relaxed.

It hits Carl hard, and it hits him all wrong. Carl knows he was going for a joke, he knows Negan wants him to mime a barf or tell him to piss off. This is a casual exchange and that’s why it scrapes Carl’s throat when he says, “Don’t do that. Don’t say things like that.” And then louder, wilder: “It wasn’t my fault.”

A long beat follows, a ringing silence. Carl’s heart is seized up in his chest. Negan’s looking at him like he’s expecting more. More doesn’t come, and so Negan sits forward, puts his elbows on his knees, and says, “Huh.” Carl can’t speak behind his clenched teeth. 

The moment passes and Negan stands. He unzips his jacket and tosses it on the foot of the bed, and he says to Carl, “You wear me the fuck out. Get back to your book. I’m gonna sack out for a while.”

Negan sleeps on his back with one hand tucked into his pants. Abraham slept like that, too. Carl’s back in the chair with his head down, blankly scanning the page he’s pretty sure he was reading, but no information’s getting through. His chest hurts and he can’t swallow his spit. He blinks again and again, and he wants to vomit but he can’t and he doesn’t really want to. His own words pile up in his mouth and he tries to cough them out: _It wasn’t my fault_. He closes the book and hugs his knees to his chest and rests his forehead there so when the tears do come they don’t run down into his mouth. He can feel a phantom twinge in the socket of his missing, ruined right eye. It wants to cry. He hiccups.

From the bed Negan’s voice comes low and heavy. He’s still on his back. “You know we’re not finished yet. You know that, right?” He lifts his hand to draw a shape in the air. “We’re gonna circle on back around to it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, like your daddy says. But kid, we are not fucking done.”

*

Negan keeps him locked up because Carl’s given him a hundred reasons to. Busy young hands find guns and daggers, but they also find bread, a pack of cards, cigarettes. “You don’t even smoke,” Negan says to him, laughing, and Carl laughs too and says, “I was gonna use them as bargaining chips. I was gonna trade your ass.” Carl learned those jokes a long time ago, and he still doesn’t get them but he knows grownups think they’re funny. Negan thinks it’s funny. He says to Carl, “Baby, that ain’t even a little bit how that works.” Carl smiles anyway. 

Negan says, not sharply, “When are you gonna quit fucking stealing shit from me?” Carl just shrugs, and then Negan steps to him, close. Carl feels the room grow deep and darker. Negan says, “You like it when I stole shit from you?”

Carl laughs but nothing’s funny. His tongue hurts as it goes dry. His voice stings his own lips when he says, “You haven't stolen anything from me.” He steps away, backward, and crosses his arms protectively. “No one has.”

*

Carl makes himself useful in the small room he now considers partially his. Negan leaves him dishes to wash. He brings Carl a big thing of rubbing alcohol and a few smaller bottles to fill with it for the med bay. Carl doesn’t have an imagination; he doesn’t daydream. He naps, he reads, he does jumping jacks and high-knees. He snoops around to see if there’s anything hidden. There never is.

Negan joins him most evenings, and they don’t talk much. Carl reads or stretches out and looks up at the ceiling. Negan’s got a worn out old softball that they sometimes toss back and forth to each other while they do their independent things. Carl’s reading when he catches the ball Negan throws his way, and Negan says, “Not bad. You play? Before all this?”

Carl hates the question. He shrugs and keeps his head down. “Yeah. With my friends, like in the back yard. I wasn’t on a team.”

“Yeah,” says Negan. “Give it back here.”

Carl looks up, gauges the distance, and lobs the ball underhand. Not far enough. It thuds to the floor and Negan steps forward and picks it up. He tosses it straight up and catches it himself a few times, then shuttles it between his hands as he speaks. “I worked in a school,” he says. Carl doesn’t believe him and lets him know it. Negan laughs. “What. Anyway, we had this training. Every year, we had this training, the whole faculty, fucking janitors, didn’t matter, everybody. Everyone who wasn’t a student, they got us all in the auditorium on a fucking Saturday and we spent six hours,” he says the words like each one is weighing him down, “learning about child abuse.”

Carl still has his book open in one hand. He’s looking at Negan, ready for him to make his point. He doesn’t want to hear what’s coming. Negan sets the ball down on the bed and says, “I know your daddy’s never raised a fucking lily-white hand to you, so that ain’t it.” He points his index finger and moves it in an arc in front of him, eyes closed, and Carl’s gut churns. He’s going down the line. “Wasn’t the gay one,” Negan says thoughtfully. He moves his hand a few spaces to the right and cracks one eye open just a sliver. “Wasn’t the dumb one, was it? The big mullet? He a tickle monster?” Carl says, “Stop. Stop it.” Negan’s eye closes again and he shakes his head and says, “Not him. No, sir. Daryl, either.” He drops his hand and opens his eyes and his tone turns casual. “At that training, they told us people who got beat on as kids were more likely to get abusive when they got older. Statistics, blah blah. Sounds like common sense to me, you give what you get. Daryl doesn’t seem like that guy, though. Beat the odds, huh? That’s our boy.” He picks the ball back up and just holds onto it. “And that just leaves Red and the Chinese kid.” Carl flinches. His face is hot. He remembers a cartoon from when he was a little, little kid, and it was a dog who got so mad at a cat that his whole head turned red and steam came out of his ears. He feels like that now. Negan muses, “Could’ve been Red. Combat vet like that, they can go n --”

Carl rockets up out of the chair. His feet land hard on the floor, the book lands hard on the floor, splayed and crumpled. He stands up to his full height, such as it is, stunted by malnutrition. He doesn’t feel small. “Stop it,” he says. His voice, to him, sounds deep and commanding. “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop talking. Just shut up. Do you ever just shut the hell up?”

With a raised brow, Negan leans back. Carl’s fingers burn. He wants a gun in his hand. _Blow his fucking head off._ He’s boiling at the temples, purple at the ears. He says, loud, “It wasn’t any of them, okay?” On the last two words his voice breaks and squeaks through his frantic throat. “It wasn’t anyone. Just shut up.”

There’s a long silence then. Carl feels his temper recede all at once like a wave. The sweat on his forehead cools and gets sticky. Negan shakes his head and says, “Man, someone did a fucking number on you.”

Carl unlocks his body. He bends down and picks up the book and messes with the pages to straighten them back out. He says to Negan, “It’s the apocalypse, dumbass. We’ve all been through shit.”

Negan’s still holding the ball in his hand. His face is pinched in an expression of sincere concern. Carl hates it. He says, “Drop it. Just forget about it. Nothing happened.” Negan shifts the ball to his other hand and then tosses it to Carl. He doesn’t move to catch it. It sails past him and thunks against the wall before hitting the floor and rolling to nudge at Carl’s heel. Negan says, “You don’t wanna talk about it, that’s fine. You don’t wanna tell me who it is, fine, it’s a free country. But look at me. Hey. Lemme see that peeper, kid.” Carl turns his gaze away from the ball on the floor and he pushes his hair away from his face with the spine of the book in his hand. When Negan speaks again, his voice is heavy. Serious. “All you gotta do is give me a nod in the right direction and I don’t give a fuck who it is, fucking believe me when I tell you that I will turn that bastard into a red fucking mist.”

Another silence, and then Carl senses his mouth turn up to smile even though he doesn’t feel like smiling. He shakes his head. “My dad already did that,” he says. “My dad gutted him with a big knife and then stabbed him like a hundred times.” His breath comes out in an ugly laugh. “It didn’t fix anything. Nothing does. Nothing fixes anything. You killed Glenn and Abraham and it didn’t get you back the people we killed. We killed your guys and it didn’t get us back the friends we lost. Killing doesn’t do anything. Nothing does anything. Nothing matters, okay?” When he inhales it’s like he’s surfacing from the bottom of a lake. “If someone does something to you, you can’t undo it. You can’t do anything about anything. You can act like a big dick and scare people and kill people and beat them to death and stab them to death, but it doesn’t make you any less messed up. Fucked up. You still have problems. Everything still sucks. It doesn’t matter who you hurt or kill. Nothing matters. Nothing does anything.”

When Carl shuts his mouth the air rings all around him. He’s been shouting. There’s a knock on the door to the room that makes Carl flinch. Negan calls out, “Leave it. It’s fine. Move along.” And then he turns to Carl and says, “Well, shit, kid.” He scrubs his palm over his mouth. “Shit. Why even stick around, if that’s the way it is?”

Carl shrugs. He’s thought about it, walking out into the forest with his dad’s pistol, or letting himself get bitten so he at least has an excuse. The time’s never right, though. There’s always stuff to take care of first. So he says to Negan, “There’s still things I need to take care of.”

“It’s fun sometimes, too, right?”

“Sometimes.” Sometimes it is.

“Yeah.” Negan tics his head to a three-quarter profile and he narrows his eyes with a smile. “You do jerk off sometimes, right? Like, couple times a year?”

An unexpected laugh bubbles up in Carl’s throat and he lets it fly out. “Holy shit, shut up,” he says before picking up the ball at his heel and tossing it in Negan’s direction. He misses and it rolls under the bed.

“Leave it,” Negan says. “Let’s go get something to eat, you little fucking weirdo. All this head-shrinking shit’s got me starved.”

Carl sniffles. He’s still smiling. He’s got a couple jokes he wants to make. That’ll make him feel better. He’ll wait until they’re in the mess hall.


End file.
